Learning About Collaborative Governance

Archive for Open Government

Video courtesy of TED.com Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has become one of the primary advocates for access to public data and its conversion to useful forms through innovative software applications. In this video, he showcases a number of examples developed by public and private agencies. Collaborative decisions require sound technical information […]

Deadlines are fast approaching for federal agencies to complete the initial tasks under the Open Government Directive. Publishing new data sets, opening websites, completing longer-term Open Government Plans, and dozens of others. But notably missing is any deadline or deliverable addressing changes in agency cultures and processes. Yet every day those basic dimensions of government […]

As a mediator, I have this annoying habit of taking all sides of an issue seriously. Further, as a colleague once put it to me, people in our line of work need to combine optimism about outcomes with cynicism about motives. So I thought I’d offer doses of both in looking at the brighter and […]

Will federal agencies really become more fully transparent, participatory and collaborative, as the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive promises? Hopes are high among advocates of the new policies that such practices will become the standard across the government. Turning that hope into the reality of a federal world of collaborative organizations, however, poses a vast […]

Although I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about this so far, the emergence of interactive tools for online citizen engagement poses interesting questions for the future of public policy consensus building. It’s still early days in the development of the web technology, and experiments so far have been spotty. Despite the high orbit of […]

Video courtesy of Web 2.0 ExpoSF-’09 and O’Reilly Media. Peter Koht of the City of Santa Cruz, CA, describes the city’s online method for gathering public ideas about how to handle a severe budget crisis. The platform is uservoice. Similar to the IdeaScale system used in the White House Open Government Initiative, it allows users […]

About Cross Collaborate

Cross Collaborate is a resource to help build capacity in public policy collaboration. We offer practical information about collaborative methods for all those involved in shaping and influencing government decisions and policies.Read more on our offerings and approach on the About page.